Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

"This is madness", Talef cants, and isn't that just the height of hypocrisy from somebody worshiping the ideoform of virulent disease. 8-Doxa-Krainaima grins at the Magos Infofector. He is very good at grinning, is Magos Krainaima. The fact that so much of his lips is missing helps with it.

Watching him working is something of an experience.

8-Doxa-Krainaima's entire style of performing his work seems to be operating under two assumptions: the first being that none of his creations are going to survive the next 24 hours, and the next that if he does not work as quickly as he possibly can, he is not going to do that either.

This brings some advantages: one of the more obvious ones is that his equipment is very mobile and highly modular, and that he can modify it to, for instance, not lobotomize the subject while the Mind Interface Unit is being implanted.

It means that the Mind Interface Unit he has is apparently capable of bypassing the usual need of months of neural retraining and regrowth to interface directly, which is extremely impressive for a piece of technology even if it apparently comes at the cost of agony that normally requires a suppression of the brain's pain receptors.

It also means that you have to fight him to properly disinfect the MIU-Spike before he rams it through the subject's temple with his pneumatic applicator, because you don't want the Astropath to die of an infection six months down the line and he doesn't quite seem to care. Now, though, the applicator has been thoroughly sterilized and is applied to the correct, designated spot.

You did insist on double-checking 8-Doxa's theory and utilizing a medical auspex scan. 8-Doxa seems insistent on having organic eyes, though they are obviously heavily modified. You are beginning to suspect that this is motivated in unduly large part by a desire to roll them.

Your precautions were, of course, entirely reasonable. That he turned out to be entirely accurate does not make this any less true.
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The spike pierces through skin and bone with ease, anchoring itself in neural tissue faster than any pain response can travel. It is unlikely, of course, that any additional pain would make any difference whatsoever to the Astropath, but you do not like to take chances when you are already taking so many of them.


For a moment, you think it's all gone wrong. The Astropath opens his eyes, staring sightlessly ahead as his jaws work against the sutures that are closing his lips. Rivulets of blood pour down his chin. Then he goes slack, and the lights within the new interface turn on, bathing the room in dim red. For a moment, you hesitate: an all-too human weakness you quickly squash. It is pointless, at this point, to step back, reevaluate, and question. The only path is forward.
With a quick twitch-impulse, you clear your internal storage of superfluous clutter, and then you interface, ready to shut off your pain receptors at a moment's notice should you threaten to be overwhelmed.

You do not notice you have passed out until it is far too late.

[Roll: Servitorisation: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: 3d6: 5,5,2: Partial Success]

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A beautiful garden is a strange request, from one such as you. Beauty has never occupied much of your conscious mind: you have ever rated effectiveness of aesthetics, function over form.

"But that just makes this place so much more interesting", she tells you.

You are in your garden. You are naked, bar of your cybernetics. The air is laced with the smell of blood and spores and pheromones. You look around yourself, opening eyes you had not realized were even closed.

Jungle stretches all around you, untamed and wild. You are atop an observation platform: a thing of simple steel and glass, granting you a view of what is going on around you.

And that is..competition, harsh and merciless.

As you watch, you see an ape-like creature with sharp teeth pounce onto a brightly-colored avian, ripping it apart before dying itself, foaming at the mouth from whatever toxins it had just ingested. The corpse has barely hit the ground before it is being set upon on all sides, torn apart by scavengers in moments until not even the bones remain.

Everywhere you watch, similar scenes play out: predator and prey, locked in their eternal struggle, from vast felines to the vines that strangle the very trees they inhabit. For a moment, you become lost, studying the myriad adaptations to this environment. You can trace them back, you note, startled. You can actually name the specific impulse that led to each of them, can map out each particular evolutionary pressure at the root of the feature.

This, you realize, startled, is the garden you promised.

"Not what other people would call a garden", she says, and then you see her, for the first time.

You whirl around rapidly, and she laughs, appearing in the reflection behind you just as she did before. She has shed her disguise now, appearing in a form that seems much more natural: the thin, sinewy body covered by a soft robe tied loosely around her waist with a broad belt of the same material, the claws at the end of her digitigrade legs hidden inside slippers miming the form of some sort of verminous creature.

That is not, of course, what really draws the eyes. That honor goes to the emerald pools that form her eyes, to the unnatural pinkness of her skin, to the snake-like appendages in place of hair that writhe around her head, tied together by a ring shaped into a mark of Slaanesh. She has pincers: long, sharp claws, blasphemous script and symbols carved into their chitinous armor and inlaid in gold. She is beautiful. She is terrible. When she grins at you, barring rows of far to sharp teeth, you feel the dread of the prey in front of the predator.

You run, then. It is not a conscious decision, not really. It is the result of instinct already ingrained before man was man, older than the upright apes you stem from.

Flee!, your mind screams at you, and you do. Naked feet slap onto glass, and suddenly you realize just how weak you are, without the metal that shields and protects you.

She hunts you. Of course she does. The same instinct that is propelling you is part of the very essence of her being, part of her soul in a way more profound than even the instincts of your flesh. You flee, and she hunts, and there can only ever be one outcome.

Pincers caress your flesh and scythe through your bones as though they were made of water, and you feel nerves you have not had for decades sing with pain so profound it is barely recognizable as such.

"Such a nice parlor you made me, little fly", the Daemonette coos.

You are lying face down in a puddle of your own blood, staring at the ruin of your body in the reflection of the glass. Down below a herd of bovines is being set upon by predatory hounds, spines on their back of limited use against the attacks that harry them.

Even as you watch, the youngest of the herd is separated from the rest and ruthlessly brought down by the pack.

The Daemonette bends down over you, and her pincer moves over your scalp in the grotesque parody of a caress, leaving more bloody ruin in its wake.

"Such an interesting person you are, Eta Nu 9 35"

Your blood is on her teeth, her lips, her teeth, and for a moment, it transfixes you.

"All of your kind, really", she purrs, and her grin is the most hideous thing you have ever seen and you cannot look away from it, "so intent in pruning everything you perceive as weak, so eager to grow towards what you think of as perfection."

Her pincer clicks, and suddenly you are whole again: more than whole, as metal replaces the flesh she sliced away, and you stretch the limbs you have had for the vast majority of your life again.

You strike her, then. Needles tear through her robes and flesh. Hydraulic legs strike her with enough force that the glass of the platform splinters around you. You cut her to ribbons with your blade and tear her apart with your arms and dose her with half a dozen of the most toxic substances you can devise, until there is nothing left of her but bloody ruin, and her grin does not waver the entire time: if anything, it grows broader.

She laughs, and it is terrible, and when she stops it leaves a terrible, hollow absence.

When you look around, you realize you are on the ground of the forest. Around you, shards of bloodstained glass have fallen like terrible rain. The Vegetation where you are is dead, killed by the terrible toxins you released.

Below you, her carcass has gone.

She is standing besides you, as whole as she was before.

"But you are more interesting than your kindred, I think. Such an intriguing paradox." She grins, and walks away, sauntering in a way that somehow brings to mind both a predator and a dancer. You follow. You have no other choice. To remain where you are means death by a thousand predatory bites, big and small.

You know, of course. After all, they are all sprung up from your own mind.

"Tell me, Eta Nu", the Daemonette asks, suddenly walking backwards, looking at you intently, "what does it mean, for someone to deny the gods so fervently and yet to wish for ascension so deeply?"

It is a genuine question, you sense, and then clamp down on that emotion, choosing to fall to sullen silence instead. She is not a real person, you remind yourself: merely a reflection of humanity's base emotions, cast into a shape that mirrors what you expect to see.

She laughs, and again you wish for nothing more than for her to stop, and again you feel a strange yearning when she does.

She snaps her pincers, then, and suddenly you are in the glass tunnels again, risen high above the jungle. This is the heart of the garden, you sense: one of its hearts, at the very least. This is the center of the entire construct, the thing it is all grown from.

"A Garden is such a simple request", the Daemonette coos, "but there are such things hidden within it."

She sweeps her claws at the jungle around you. "What is beauty, for instance? What is perfection? What is paradise? Such a simple question to ask, and yet there is a different answer from everyone I query."

You see them, then: a thousand gardens made by a thousand people, some simple and unimaginative, other chaotic and ostentatious, some filled with nobody, others overflowing with men or women or animals in all sorts of different forms and configurations. She lingers, for a moment, on a place that seems to consist of rivers of honey, milk, and wine, nymphs bathing in each of the streams.

You note the disgust on her face. "And so many of them, my dear Eta Nu, are sooo boring."

She snaps her claw, and you are in the Jungle again. There is something perching in it's center, you notice, but you cannot see it.

"Not you, though, my dear. You walk the Path of Glory, and you do it in such a fascinating manner. Not the easy road for Eta Nu."

She smiles, and raises her pincers as though she was conducting a concerto, and suddenly whatever prevented you from seeing whatever perched at the center of the Garden fell away.

You see….yourself, not as you are right now, but as you might be. You see a vast, bloated spider, sitting at the center of a web of evolving perfection, encased in living, silver metal. You see yourself pull at one of the strings of the intricate map of predation and survival you have created, see the warp ripple as somewhere in your garden, a creature mutates, in a manner that will either help it survive and thrive or doom it's new-found species to utter extinction. You see yourself gorge on the knowledge you have gained, and another of your hands move to tug at another string that runs through time and space and genes.

You see…

"Evolution made manifest. A thousand thousand choices, an infinite number of permutations, and they could be yours to make."

The Daemonette grins again, then gets serious so abruptly it seems a light has gone out of the world. "Is this what you want?"

It is not, you realize, a question she knows the answer to. It is not a question you know the answer to. You have bared your soul to this creature, and at its heart there is a question you did not even know you were asking yourself.

Is this what you want?

[] Yes
[] No

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She leaves you to sit and ponder this question for what seems like an eternity, but then you suddenly find yourself back in the glass walkway, observing your jungle. You are higher up, now, above the garden you have made. All around you, you can see the other gardens, the other places that your hostess has collected. Glittering pathways run between them, more of these strange platforms of glass and steel, and it takes you a moment to discover why they feel so familiar.

They look like the circuits you observed on the outside: the nerves of the astropaths, strung up between their sleeping, pain-wracked bodies to transmit whatever they meant to transmit.

It is no wonder Talef struggled so much to decipher the principles the device operated on.

You look up, and almost regret doing it. Above you, there is a swirl of dreams, uncurated and wild, taken from all across the galaxy.

"Van Hex and I came to a…mutually pleasing arrangement", the Daemonette tells you, and her grin makes the very idea sound so much more obscene then it could have possibly been. "I get to gorge on all these fools that step into my web, and in return I spit what I have chewed up into their empty shells in whatever form this Coterie desires."

She grins, whirls around in a dance that sets her robes flying. "They never want people with broad aspirations and dreams, or pity, or mercy. All they ever want is killers and saboteurs and puppets, and all the rest I can keep all to myself."

You see something of her true form, then: a gorged and happy parasite, sitting in her crystal like a fly in amber.

Something, though, gnaws at your mind. Something doesn't add up.

Daemons guard against captivity, against the limitations it imposes: even if you don't quite agree with such personalizing vocabulary, the sentiment that lies at it's foundation still holds true.

This is a cage for her, for it. By everything you know, it should be trying to weasel its way out.

And yet it doesn't.

Your thoughts are not quite private, anymore, but neither are its own, whatever passes for them anyhow. It grasps your suspicions, and instantly they are confirmed.

It is not simply here by its own choice. It is here because being away from here is worse, because there is something out there that is seeking to kill her.

She hisses, and you find your sudden bout of insight closed as she slams the doors to her mind closed, but it is more than enough.

"Whatever you are hiding from", you ask, "it has found you, hasn't it?"

The Daemon does not answer. It does not have to.

Something tries to ram it's way into the glittering pathways all around you, and suddenly the entire system is flooded by fear.

Not just the astropath's fear, you note, strangely detached even as it washes over you, even as you feel your heart rate rise to frankly dangerous levels.

It is the pseudo-intellects fear, something you hadn't even considered them capable of having. It is the fear of an immortal, timeless being in the face of annihilation.

You see the tip of a pincer much larger than hers worm it's way through a pathway that is dark and cast in shadow, and despite your fear you find that interesting. There is another way in, you note: a chink in what should be a closed shell, formed through some manner you do not understand.

Then it is gone, and the fear with it.

"Help me", the Daemonette hisses, and rage seems to intermix with genuine desperation. "Stop her", she begs, and suddenly you are flying backwards, through the glittering tunnels, through the red tunnel of 8-Doxa's creation, back into your own body.

You awake with a gasp, and nerves that are utterly aflame. Pain curses through your body and then recedes, with one worrying exception.

You run your hand across your scalp, where pinpricks of pain still persist, and find little stubbles of bone where none where before.

Mutation, you grasp: a gift, from your lovely hostess. A quick internal scan reveals nothing permanently harmful: merely the beginnings of long spines, akin to those of porcupines, that may in time grow to resemble hair.

Still, it is an imposition: one you would ordinarily not hesitate to rid yourself of.

When you look at the data that emanates from 8-Doxa and Talef, however, you suspect that there might be other issues that will shortly occupy your time.

"A Gladius-Class Frigate has entered the system", the Magos Mactator informs you, and you wish he wasn't quite so cheerful.

"Identified as the Skinpiercer."

"All they've transmitted so far was 'we have come for you'", Talef informs you. He seems a bit more scared, at least.

"How long was I out", you ask, and 8-Doxa exchanges a glance with Talef.

Four days. You were out four days, spent most of that time getting pointlessly tortured, and picked up a mutation along the way. "The Skinpiercer is about four days out, still", 8-Doxa informs you. "Defenses are being put up, and we're being asked to assist. What do you wish to do?"

He is itching to fight, you note.

Talef, as you expected, proves somewhat more restrained. "Did you find anything in there?", you ask, and you nod, grimly, telling you about the evidence for the backdoor into the system.

"Well", the Magos Infofector asks, "what do you want to do now."
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[Priority]
One of the things on your plate will have to take priority, though you may still return to the others as soon as it is finished. But what might it be?

[] Take Care Of The Mutation
Something has been imposed upon you, and you will not have it. Before you do anything else, you will take care off the changes to your body that have been done.
[] Take Care Of The Backdoor
You are here to fulfill a task, and this does it. Whatever is intruding into the system, it should be stopped before it can do whatever it is it wishes to do.
[] Help with Defenses
Whatever the issue with the machine is, it can wait: repelling these assailant clearly takes priority, and the longer you can aid in shaping the defenses, the more effective they will be.
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Any option but helping with the defenses will not take up the entirety of the time you have left, though how much time it does take is up to how well you roll. You may, as such, still have time to do other things. If you help with defenses it will be assumed that you are dedicating the entirety of your time to this.